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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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I think ‘from the river to the sea’ shouldn’t be banned at colleges or universities, and I agree that most people who use it don’t intend for it to mean the ethnic cleansing or murder of Israelis. (I also think most people, even at Malema rallies, who shout ‘kill the Boer’ don’t actually want to exterminate Afrikaner farmers, but they do typically quite transparently wish to dispossess them).

Nevertheless, as in that case, ‘from the river to the sea’ effectively means the large-scale murder of Jews, since no Palestinian one-state solution would tolerate a longstanding Jewish presence and because the democratically elected leadership of a free Palestine would almost certainly be an Islamist group that, like Hamas and the Houthis and bolstered by countless extremely anti-Jewish hadiths that have become more prominent in Islamist scholarship over the last forty years (gharqad tree etc), would in practice seek to kill any remaining Jews in Palestine.

You can draw the South Africa comparison, but the simple fact is that South African black people mostly have no personal animus toward whites. There is a politician grift complex and there is plenty of resentment that 30 years after apartheid ended many are still poor etc etc, but the primary racial hostilities in South Africa are between blacks and Indians, between indigenous black peoples (ie. Khoi-San) and Bantus, and between South African citizens and migrants from the Congo and elsewhere in Central Africa who are perceived as pushing down wages for the urban poor. This was substantially true even before 1994, and from the rich to the poor few people in SA actually think that kicking out whites will solve the country’s problem. Even today, polling in SA shows that:

South Africans say creating jobs and fighting corruption are much more important as government priorities than “racism”, or “land reform”.

By contrast, it is clear that the primary policy preference of most Palestinians in the Levant is hostility towards Jewish rule of Israel even at extraordinary cost to themselves, no matter how many bodies pile up. There would be no ‘debate’ on land reform in a one-state Palestine (unlike in SA, where whites still own 55% of prime agricultural land, the majority of valuable private enterprise and so on), everything would be taken. And given that this hostility is also a longstanding part of Islamic religious and cultural values, we can assume without any leaps of logic that the end of Israel as a Jewish state would also guarantee, in short order, the end of any Jewish presence in Palestine. Meanwhile, there are many African countries like Namibia, Botswana and Kenya that retain sizable white communities 50+ years after independence.

the simple fact is that South African black people mostly have no personal animus toward whites

Why does the EFF get all that support, then?

indigenous

Off topic, but is there a coherent definition of this word?

The EFF polls around 10-15% now. The EFF is also much more leftist than the ANC or DA, its messaging isn’t solely about taking white money but also about redistribution from rich to poor generally, I don’t think it’s correct to ascribe anti-white animus to every EFF voter even if Malema obviously has it.

There’s no coherent definition of indigenous because whether, for example, South African Bantus or New Zealand Maori are indigenous depends on where you draw the cutoff line.

most people who use it don’t intend for it to mean the ethnic cleansing or murder of Israelis.

They don't even know which river and sea!

This might be true, but seems kind of like an insanity plea.

I mean, these are not kindergardeners who will happily sing every song their minders teach them without any reflection on the deeper philosophical meaning. These are digital natives who presumably can read Wikipedia.

Likewise, not one in ten thousand university students lives under so thick a rock or so deep within a filter bubble that they were factually unaware of the Oct 7 attacks (which are among the largest terror attacks in the western world since 9/11.).